Posts by DailyLlama

Engineer sabotaged hardware then complained when it didn't work

Back in the late 90s/early 2000s

When screensavers with sounds were all the rage, the girl who sat behind me used to have the Haunted House theme. Her job meant that she'd have to leave her desk fairly frequently to process customer orders etc, so the screensaver would turn on a lot. And make all sorts of screaming and creaking noises, which was pretty annoying. So I disabled it. And she re-enabled it. So I uninstalled it. My colleague (unknown to me at the time) helped her to reinstall it. Then one glorious day, while I was covering their lunch breaks, I finally had enough, and took the speaker out of her computer. Problem solved forever!

Blustering Blackbeard's PC was all at sea, sysadmin got him shipshape in seconds

One of my IT dept colleagues...

Was getting really frustrated with a server one day, we could hear lots of huffing and puffing and muttering, then he slammed his keyboard on the desk, punched the monitor (CRT, so pretty indestructible), flipped the bird with both hands at the screen, and stormed out, slamming the door.

Sadly, the door happened to have a fire safety closer on it, so after a briefly quick movement, it slowed to a snails pace with a high pitched whine, and all five of us in the office had to wait 6 seconds for it to finally close before we could burst out laughing.

Microsoft issues patch to tackle Windows 10 Extended Security Updates failures

Re: Doesn't work for me...

That is standalone - Windows Update doesn't even see the November Security patch

Doesn't work for me...

I've installed the new update on a couple of devices, and that's ok, but then I still can't install the Cumulative update. Sigh.

BOFH: The Prints of Darkness pays a visit

Simon has clearly had to deal with these people before... and I applaud this course of action!

Beer is on me, Simon!

Astronomers red-faced after mistaking Musk's Tesla Roadster for asteroid

Re: I think .....

It only took so long because it hadn't exploded or caught fire

BOFH: Forecasting and the fine art of desktop upgrades

Re: I've had to suffer a hardware buy that was the other way around!

"w**king for the New Hardware Stupidity!"

You got paid for that??

BOFH: Don't sell The Boss a firewall. Sell him The Dream

That reminds me of "The Plan"

The Plan

In the beginning, there was a plan,

And then came the assumptions,

And the assumptions were without form,

And the plan without substance,

And the darkness was upon the face of the workers,

And they spoke among themselves saying,

"It is a crock of shit and it stinks."

And the workers went unto their Supervisors and said,

"It is a pile of dung, and we cannot live with the smell."

And the Supervisors went unto their Managers saying,

"It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong,

Such that none may abide by it."

And the Managers went unto their Directors saying,

"It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide by its strength."

And the Directors spoke among themselves saying to one another,

"It contains that which aids plants growth, and it is very strong."

And the Directors went to the Vice Presidents saying unto them,

"It promotes growth, and it is very powerful."

And the Vice Presidents went to the President, saying unto him,

"This new plan will actively promote the growth and vigour

Of the company With very powerful effects."

And the President looked upon the Plan

And saw that it was good,

And the Plan became Policy.

And this, my friend, is how shit happens.

Whomp-whomp: AI PCs make users less productive

Re: I'm not surprised...

Nothing. The apostrophe in "grammar's" is used for the contraction of "grammar is".

Windows 11 migration? Upgrade engine revs up, enterprises have no choice

Re: 0patch

There is very little chance that my company would allow me to install patches for Windows that are not written by Microsoft...

Embattled users worn down by privacy options? Let them eat code

If it's a law, it doesn't matter if Google or Apple don't like it...

Developer tried to dress for success, but ended up attired for an expensive outage

Hard hats

At my last job, we had a room with all the HVAC ducting in it, and as such everyone was required to wear hard hats when in it. The problem was that the ducting was 6'3" off the floor, and being 6' I could walk under it safely, until I put a hard hat on, after which I was continually banging the hat on the ducting.

Sadly logic doesn't factor in these rules, and as the tallest person in my team (only my manager was taller than me) I tried to get other people to go into that room instead...

Enterprising techie took the bumpy road to replacing vintage hardware

Re: Peripherals

Yes, but the notes were shredded for security purposes.

IT sent the intern to sort out the nasty VP who was too important to bother with backups

Once had a similar thing with a laptop whose keyboard had not been installed correctly, and the delete key was in the top right corner. Every time the lid was closed with the device running, and Outlook open, all of the user's emails vanished...

After several people had looked at it, and recovered all the messages, they finally brought it to me, and after discounting the hackers or the malware, I just pushed the keyboard into place and voila, problem solved.

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

We had a complete technophobe of a marketing director, back in around 2002, who never used his computer. He'd always come to us to dictate emails (despite none of us being secretaries), and when we asked him why, he complained that his computer was really old and slow. And to be fair, it was the last 486 in the building, so we ordered him a shiny new Pentium 3.

When it arrived, I took out his old computer, and he took the opportunity to rearrange his office a bit. Meaning that the new computer was now too far from the network port, and I needed to get a new cable. We didn't have any of the right length in stock, so I ordered some new ones, and told him that I'd be back to install the cable in the next couple of days.

Things happened, there was a weekend, and it was 6 weeks before he came back to me to say that his new computer didn't work... SIX WEEKS!

BOFH: WELCOME TO COLOSSAL SERVER ROOM ADVENTURE!!

A better story than Bandersnatch!

Bosses face losing 'key' workers after forcing a return to office

No, because I don't have them. Some of the guys in my team like to come to the office to get away from all that at home, and I understand that, but surely the choice should be ours? I work better at home without any interruptions, they work better in the office, with fewer interruptions.

I genuinely don't mind being in the office, it's just the complete waste of time and effort of sitting in traffic for an hour before and after work that bothers me.

When I WFH, I don't have to get up until 8:45, and when I finish at 6, I am already at home, and ready to cook a proper dinner. At lunchtime I can get on my exercise bike and knock out a quick 10km, have a shower and a sandwich and get back to work within the hour.

I can't do any of that in the office, and I can't not take the lunch hour to leave early, so I sit and read a book, as it's a lot safer than wandering the mean streets of Uxbridge.

Cunningly camouflaged cable routed around WAN-sized hole in project budget

We had a similar one: Wireless Ethernet between buildings that got interrupted every Tuesday morning. When the car dealership across the road took delivery of new vehicles, and the transporter parked in the middle of the road to unload.

Is there anything tape can’t fix? This techie used it to defeat the Sun

Re: I need my local printer

We had a user who complained that her local printer (on the desk opposite hers) was too far away, and she'd hurt her back stretching to get printouts from it. So Health and Safety asked me to have a look at it (knowing that I was a curmudgeon)... I duly went to the office, inspected the printer and the layout of the office, and noting that there was a huge networked MFD in the same room, I removed the local printer so that she would have to stand up and walk to the other one, thus preventing her injuring herself further.

Student requested access to research data. And waited. And waited. And then hacked to get root

Re: In Code We Trust

Yep, I used it when I was at a site migrating PCs from the old company domain to our one (having purchased their company) and realised after the first reboot that I'd forgotten to change the local admin account password, and therefore couldn't log on to join to the new domain...

EU mandated messaging platform love-in is easier said than done: Cambridge boffins

Someone...

hasn't read the other post about boffins today!

https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/29/scientists_boffins/

Techie fired for inventing an acronym – and accidentally applying it to the boss

People aren't Hardware or Software, so it must be a Meatware problem...

New IT boss decided to 'audit everything you guys are doing wrong'. Which went wrong

Obvious troll is obvious...

'What's the point of me being in my office, just because they want to see me in the office?'

Re: Contract clauses

My "office hours" have not changed while I've been working from home. My work laptop lives in my spare bedroom/office, and does not come out of there unless I'm going to the physical office building.

I do not go into that room before 9am, or after 6pm. Those are my contracted hours, I do not get paid overtime, thus no overtime happens.

UK comms regulator rings death knell for fax machines

Much loved???

By who?

PC component scavenging queue jumper pulled into line with a screensaver

I did exactly the same

to a colleague who had been to watch Man Utd lose the Champions League final to Barcelona.

I got approval from our manager first, and he was just as big a joker as me, so happily went for it.

He eventually asked me how to get rid of it after seeing the grinning Barcelona team as his wallpaper for two weeks.

BOFH: You want presentation layer, but we're physical layer

"They say they brought their MacBook Air in and you refused to take a look at it."

"Oh, I thought you said COMPUTER!" the PFY says.

It's not a computer, it's a fashion accessory.

*Where did the Paris Hilton icon go??

Chemical plant taken offline by the best one of all: C₈H₁₀N₄O₂

Java installation

I arrived at work one morning to be greeted with the news that "someone tried to install Java on one of the MFD printers, and it didn't work".

As I was pre-coffee myself, it took me a while to work out what they meant. When I got upstairs, I found that someone had put a pint of freshly brewed coffee on the sorter unit of the MFD (cost ~£20,000), and proceeded to print out their days instruction booklets. Whereupon the sorted had duly started moving up and and down rapidly, and spilled the pint of coffee into the printer.

Fortunately this user was only a partial idiot, and had turned the printer off to prevent anything too bad from happening... so I separated all the parts I could, and we dried as much as we could with paper towels, and then I raised a ticket with our printe management company. Who turned up a couple of hours later, and miraculously, nothing had gotten inside it.

It did smell nice for a couple of weeks though!

Doctor gave patients the wrong test results due to 'printer problems'

Re: Photocopier challange

This is an annoyance of mine. If you require instructions on how to use the parking brake, it's too complicated. Get rid of the stupid button, and put the big lever back in the middle of the car, where everyone knows what and where it is.

In a time before calculators, going the extra mile at work sometimes didn't add up

Re: The d in £sd

Spare a talent for an old ex-leper?

Mouse hiding in cable tray cheesed off its bemused user

We used to do this...

When wireless mice first came out. Except they only had two channels, so if more than two people were using them, everyone's equipment quickly becamse useless.

And for a joke, when you were bored, you'd just change the channel on your mouse and move it around a lot and wait for the cries of surprise and annoyance from your colleagues.

Even better were the keyboards. Change the channel, and type something like "This is IT, your account has been suspended for watching too much porn"

'I wonder what this cable does': How to tell thicknet from a thickhead

We had a complete technophobe of a marketing director, back in around 2002, who never used his computer. He'd always come to us to dictate emails (despite none of us being secretaries), and when we asked him why, he complained that his computer was really old and slow. And to be fair, it was the last 486 in the building, so we ordered him a shiny new Pentium 3.

When it arrived, I took out his old computer, and he took the opportunity to rearrange his office a bit. Meaning that the new computer was now too far from the network port, and I needed to get a new cable. We didn't have any of the right length in stock, so I ordered some new ones, and told him that I'd be back to install the cable in the next couple of days.

Things happened, there was a weekend, and it was 6 weeks before he came back to me to say that his new computer didn't work... SIX WEEKS!

Reg readers tell us what they wanted for SysAdmin Appreciation Day

I got the same as most of you...

Absolutely sod all.

Microsoft warns Windows 10 patch broke printing for some

I don't see the problem

Just get rid of all your printers, and it's all fine.

A character catastrophe for a joker working his last day

The company I worked for acquired another smaller company, and after a few months closed them down, making everyone redundant.

When we turned up at the site to start collecting all the equipment up, one of the senior senior managers noticed a flashing light on a label printer, and asked someone what it meant. "Probably a paused print job", came the reply. So he pressed the button next to it, releasing a job of 5,000 labels saying "<company name> are c@nts!"

Highly amusing for everyone except the manager...

We've got a photocopier and it can copy anything

That's so stupid...

...it's almost brilliant

This is the military – you can't just delete your history like you're 15

It's happened to me a few times...

I was in my office one day circa 2001, and "someone" came in and put a Zip disk (remember them?) into the drive of a computer used by someone who wasn't in that day. Then went back to their own desk.

Then I noticed the activity light flashing a lot, and being a nosy bugger (and not trusting this person a jot), I opened Windows Explorer and went to the Zip drive, and found that the disk was filling up with images of women who had clearly gotten too warm, and decided to remove all their clothing.

Screenshots were duly taken (of filenames, not the images), and information sent to HR & Management, whereupon the user in question claimed that he was "copying it for a friend who didn't have internet access). Management then decided that even though there was a precedent of sacking people caught doing this kind of thing, that he merely merited a warning.

Rufus and ExplorerPatcher: Tools to remove Windows 11 TPM pain and more

Re: Just goes to show..

"Why not just provide a mechanism to import group policies, convert them and apply them*?"

This, a million times over. Then my users who don't/don't know how/cba connect to the VPN will have their policies updated, and settings set.

A great day for non-robots: iOS 16 will bypass CAPTCHAs

That's lovely, but...

When will they give me a way to block cookies without having to click on "Reject All" on practically every single website I go on?

BOFH: Tech helps HR investigate the Boss's devices

Inspirational!

The BofH is a lesson for us all. Record every interaction with HR. And everyone else...

Teeth marks yield clue to widespread internet outage in Canada

Thanks, I just had it stuffed!

Global pandemic was good for business, say UK infosec pros – but we're still burning out

Re: Telling times

I think we can all agree that all politicians were asleep during their history lectures, otherwise they wouldn't keep making the same mistakes over and over again...

Original killer PC spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3 now runs on Linux natively

Never mind 1-2-3

Bring back Ami Pro! I loved that so much more than Word.

Microsoft exposes glue-free guts of the Surface Laptop Studio

I've used Surface tablets, and much like Macbooks, they're hugely overpriced, and just seem to be fashion accessories, rather than actual computers.

Netflix to crack down on account sharing, offer ad-laden cheaper options

So many things wrong with the TV/Streaming model

It's partly due to naff content, partly that I've seen pretty much everything I want to watch from them over the last two years, and partly that although I have access to Netflix, Amazon Prime, Sky Movies and Disney Plus, there are still things that I can't get.

I'm not going to get any more subscriptions, especially when things disappear from them and someone else gets to decide what I can and can't watch. Everyone has suddenly decided that they need their own streaming service, and you can only view their content on that. I've had enough of them all, I want one service with access to all of them, so I can pick and choose the few shows/films I want to see, and not pay for all the rest of the dross that I will never watch.

Also, while I'm on a rant, how do Sky get away with charging you for access to channels, and then forcing you to watch adverts. If I'm paying for a service, I expect to get it without adverts. And if you insist on having adverts, then why am I paying for it?

Half of bosses out of touch with reality, study shows

I don't know about anyone else

But they're going to have to pay me a lot more to get up early and sit in traffic again. Time for companies to realise that work/life balance has to include the commute time too.

BOFH: The Geek's Countergambit – outwitted at an electronics store

Poor Colin

I suspect we won't hear much from him again, as concrete is VERY good at muffling sound.

Allegedly.

BOFH: On Wednesdays, we wear gloves

Clever writing

Not a single actual threat, just the power of suggestion!

Nothing's working, and I've checked everything, so it must be YOUR fault

Several times...

The worst was a 400 mile round trip from Uxbridge to Newton Abbot to restart a server after someone swore they'd done it, only to find out they'd turned the monitor off and on again.